"Stay Humble and Teachable"

"Stay humble and teachable." -Dad

That's the simplest advice my dad gave to me while I was out serving my mission in Japan. To him, a successful missionary is humble in a way that he or she is willing to submit to the will of the Lord and able to obediently follow the instructions of his or her leaders. While a missionary does teach most of the time, they still have to be teachable, meaning that can be molded by the Lord, learning new things, sometimes by repetition, and sometimes from mistakes made because one learns best that way.

I'm in a new ward for the Spring Semester and I mean quite literally about the "new" part. It's a newly organized ward, approved by the First Presidency because the ward boundaries were altered due to the influxes between changing student population and number of new missionaries departing since the lowering age requirements. I was called by my new Bishop for this semester to be a Sunday School teacher. Now, I've had experience serving as part of the Sunday School Presidency back home and I've taught quite a few class lessons so I had no trouble in accepting this calling. The only curve ball coming out of left field about this is that I'm team-teaching with a sister from Relief Society as my team-teaching partner every week. And according to my Bishop, my team-teaching partner is new at teaching Sunday School, so buckle up! But seriously, I look forward to this new ward experience and hope to learn a few things from this calling as well as from my team-teaching partner. We are called to these capacities because the Lord willed it and He wants us to learn something from the experiences we gain from serving. Once again, I take that attitude as I am now called to serve as a Sunday School teacher for a brand-new YSA ward here at BYU-Idaho. Gospel's true!